Wednesday 12 February 2014

The first ten million years were the worst...


.... and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.

(Marvin, explaining the essence of being an Android.)

My Javascript toy outgrew Javascript and so I took a look at Android, thinking this might be fun. 

Now I'm not a fan of piddly little screens and awkward data input, but well, said toy would actually be useful on a portable device and so...

Tip 1: The help pages are not all too helpful. Every single one of their instruction for Linux will give you at least 2 puzzles to solve, and most are not that trivial.  

Tip 2: The download link gives you partial downloads, but at least the helpfile points out that this doesn't contain everything you need.  Which is helpful.

Tip 3: No, the problem is NOT that you run that emulator  over the network, nope. Due to umm, emulator emulation, which maketh a veritable treacly emulsion out of the computing power of the shiny new hardware you have.  You can attempt to tweak it in various ways, but it will still be slower than anything you've ever used in the past *uh* 30 years. The emulated device takes about 5 minutes to come up, and it gets worse from thereon.

Tip 4: For a less retro experience, get and install Genymotion. It is still pretty slow, but semi-workable, with patience.

On the plus side: playing with Android is almost as fun (but not as productive or as fast) as working ye olde ZX Spectrum and you'll have enough time to play a few moves of Kingdom of Loathing whilst-u-wait and the game contains just about the level of humor you need in this situation -- an adventurer is you!